Murderous Trips Into the Past, Then a Return to a Dangerous Present

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CreditCreditPablo Amargo

By Marilyn Stasio

Feb. 2, 2018

Inspector Ian Rutledge haunts Charles Todd’s mysteries like an unhappy ghost, wandering among the living but more at home among the dead. In THE GATEKEEPER (Morrow, $26.99), the shellshocked veteran of World War I is investigating a murder in Wolfpit, a village that once served as a holding pen for trapped wolves. But by the winter of 1920 the place has evolved into a comfortable cage for trapped souls, notably the wounded veterans and grieving widows who make up much of its shrunken population.

“This wasn’t the usual village murder,” Rutledge notes when Stephen Wentworth, the proprietor of the town’s bookstore, is shot dead by a stranger who accosts him as he’s driving along a country road in the dark of night. According to a note left in the inspector’s hotel room, “Stephen Wentworth is a murderer. He got what he deserved.” Not even his mother has a kind word for him. “He was always a disappointing child,” she tells Rutledge, “and he grew into a disappointing man.”

Every decent detective feels obliged to bring about justice on behalf of a murder victim. Here Rutledge is honor bound to restore the good name of a young man who may not have been guilty of the homicide that, even in death, hangs over his head. And the only way to do that is to find the real killer.

As always in this singular series, the mother-and-son team who write as Charles Todd position their mystery within the broader context of a nation frozen in postwar depression. Viewing the world through Rutledge’s eyes, we can’t help noticing that there are very few able-bodied young men left in the village. Even young women are in scant supply, many having been lured to the cities by the well-paid work offered by factories in need of laborers while the men were off on the battlefield. The melancholy tone that distinguishes the Rutledge series is a reminder that war never ends for the families and friends of lost loved ones. It just retreats into the shadows.

♦

Elvis Cole is the kind of private detective a woman would turn to if her teenage son started wearing a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that retails for $40,000. In THE WANTED (Putnam, $28), Robert Crais’s superior specimen of tough-guy hero rides to the rescue of a single mother, Devon Connor, who’s worried sick about 17-year-old Tyson. Cole quickly determines that the kid is running with some “crash-and-burn children” whose wealthy Los Angeles parents have no idea that their offspring have committed a string of burglaries and are selling the goods at the Venice flea market. Unfortunately, a laptop they’ve stolen is worth money and human lives to someone who has sent a pair of hired guns to retrieve it. After they murder one of the young thieves, the others become Cole’s headache.

Crais writes choice dialogue for those hired guns, Harvey and Stemms. In fact, their heated discussion about the shower scene in “Psycho” is so entertaining you wish they didn’t have to go the way of all secondary characters in hard-boiled crime novels and, you know, die.

♦

Paradise, according to Frank Tallis in MEPHISTO WALTZ (Pegasus, $25.95), is an exact replica of early-20th-century Vienna, “where celestial coffeehouses lined the principal approaches to the Pearly Gates.” That would make angels of the psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann and his friend, Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, the brainy sleuths in Tallis’s erudite series of historical mysteries. He seizes on the singular appeal of this period, from the luscious apfelschmarrn and topfenstrudel served in the fashionable cafes to the lively intellectual discourse of their learned patrons. (“The Viennese were so highly strung, so nervous, even symphonies got them agitated.”)

A disfigured corpse discovered in the workshop of a derelict piano manufacturer leads to revelations about the city’s dark side, an underworld of anarchists plotting to assassinate Emperor Franz Josef. A woman who has built a bombmaking factory in her basement makes a memorable appearance, as does Dr. Sigmund Freud, who advances the argument that “a political party is just another form of crowd” and politicians are dangerous because they’re “buoyed up by the people who stand behind them, carried forward on waves of feeling.”

♦

Ilka Jensen is nothing if not resourceful. In the first novel in Sara Blaedel’s new series, THE UNDERTAKER’S DAUGHTER (Grand Central, $26), Jensen leaves her home in Copenhagen and flies to Racine, Wis., after her estranged father leaves her an undertaking business in his will. On her first day, Jensen must add pet dogs to the plans for a funeral service, pick up a severely mangled body at the morgue (“Bring along some extra plastic. It sounds like it might be a mess”) and come up with $60,000 to keep the I.R.S. from freezing her assets. To make this new life complete, the police inform her that one of the bodies in her freezer is probably a murderer. Most amateur sleuths hold down professional jobs to support their unofficial detective work. Blaedel has come up with an especially challenging occupation for Jensen, but this 6-foot-tall Viking goddess is strong enough to carry it all by herself.

Marilyn Stasio has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.